How to Get YouTube to Load Faster on Mozilla Firefox. (Speed Up YouTube)

A short tutorial showing you how to speed up loading times for YouTube when using Firefox as your playback browser. A remedy for Google’s sneaky feature that throttles other browsers YouTube playback efficiency.

As browsers like Safari, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox get more reliable, faster, and use far fewer resources, Google has found itself under quite a lot of pressure to pull ahead of the competition. In a sneaky move to increase the performance gap of other browsers, Google has made some subtle changes to YouTube’s coding to slow down and reduce YouTubes performance on other browsers.

Chris Paterson, a program manager at Mozilla, confirms that the problem isn’t browser-based and is the direct result of Google’s cunning decision to use a deprecated shadow DOM API, which can now only be found in Chrome. With this new API, Chrome now has a strong advantage over its competitors, whos users may quickly switch to Chrome for a faster YouTube experience.

It's important to note that if you have a strong Internet connection, you probably won't notice much of a slow down when using YouTube on another browser other than Chrome. However, anyone with slower connections will notice the difference dramatically. Thankfully, if you really don’t want to switch from Firefox to Chrome just because of YouTube, there is a way to get around the cunning YouTube slowdown.

How Do you Make YouTube Load Faster on Mozilla Firefox?

If you have come this far expecting some complicated, difficult procedure, you will be happy to know that speeding up YouTube on Firefox is as simple as installing an extension. The extension is called YouTube classic and reverts YouTube back to its slightly older material design layout before the shadow DOM API took over.

Once you have added the Classic YouTube extension to Firefox, it will automatically switch YouTube back to is older format, so you won’t have to make any changes or custom configurations. You’ll also notice that YouTubes entire interface will revert back to the old format, which loads faster in all aspects, not just video playback. The only downside to the old layout is that it doesn’t have the option for Dark mode by default, however, you can use an extension called Stylus to quickly and easily fix that.

Note: From time to time, you may notice some small bugs or glitches with the extension, this happens when YouTube changes their interface and requires the developer of Classic YouTube to update the extension. Usually, you will only have to wait a day or two for the extension to be updated.

If you ever decide that you would rather have the new look YouTube with slower videos the only way to revert back is to uninstall the Classic YouTube extension. Once it has been uninstalled, YouTube will revert back to its new material design layout. If you don’t always use Mozilla Firefox and would like to bypass Google’s YouTube speed restrictions or just change back to the old layout on another browser, check out the following guides.